Google News Shuttered in Spain Thanks to “Ancillary Copyright” Law | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"Today, Google has announced that it will be permanently shutting down the Spanish version of Google News, effective from December 16, 2014. The shutdown comes in direct response to amendments to the Spanish intellectual property law (Ley De Propiedad Intelectual) imposing a compulsory fee for the use of snippets of text to link to news articles, by online news aggregators that provide a search service ... Spain decided to one-up Germany by making the right to payment inalienable, so that even the news organization quoted is not permitted to waive it. The shuttering of Google News was therefore predictable, and it is hard to see what value this has achieved for the press in Spain or for Spanish (and Spanish speaking) Internet users. Time will tell whether Yahoo News will follow suit—since Yahoo, unlike Google, does monetize its news service with ads.  Are these laws just a big stick for European countries to use against large US tech companies?Certainly, that is part of the motivation; authorities are concerned that US-based tech companies are profiting from European data without paying their fair share of tax on the revenue earned. But if that was all this was about, there would be much more direct ways of addressing it than by passing special-interest amendments to copyright law to benefit press publishers.  What concerns EFF more is that these ancillary copyright laws form part of a broader trend ofderogation from the right to link. This can be seen when you examine the other parts of the Spanish copyright amendments that take effect in January (here in PDF)—notably placing criminal liability on website operators who refuse to removemere links to copyright-infringing material ..."